Experts think Moscow 'dangled' a Russian lawyer to lure in Trump

The
Russian lawyer who met with President Donald Trump's son may
have been angling for the president.The episode raises questions about what happened during
and after the meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and other campaign
associates."It's like peeling an onion," one expert said.

The Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. in June 2016 at
Trump Tower, under the guise of offering the Trump campaign
damaging information on Hillary Clinton, may have been a "dangle"
aimed at enticing then-candidate Donald Trump and his associates
into colluding during the campaign.

"I absolutely think this was a dangle," said Mieke Eoyang, a
former House Intelligence Committee staffer who is now the vice
president for the national security program at the organization
Third Way. "I would assume it was not the only one and that we'll
hear more about these efforts as we go along."

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Joseph Nye, a professor emeritus at Harvard's Kennedy School of
Government who formerly served as chair of the National
Intelligence Council, also said it was plausible Veselnitskaya
was used to determine whether the Trump campaign was open to
colluding with Russia.

"The Kremlin is not so softhearted that it would set up a meeting
to restore adoptions," Nye said.

Trump Jr., the president's eldest son,
tweeted an email chain on Tuesday from June 2016 in which he
entertained accepting damaging information on Clinton as part of
the Russian government's support for his father's campaign.

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The four-page email chain, which Trump Jr. forwarded to his
father's campaign manager at the time, Paul Manafort, and to
Trump's son-in-law and current senior adviser, Jared Kushner,
culminated in their meeting at Trump Tower on June 9 with Natalia
Veselnitskaya - a lawyer described in the emails as a "Russian
government attorney."

The episode signals that the campaign was willing to accept
Russian help and has raised questions about what happened during
and after the meeting with Veselnitskaya.

'Layer after layer' emerges

"The act of offering such information was likely, at minimum, a
trial balloon, and at best (from Moscow's perspective), a chance
to pass certain information from an agent of the Russian
government to the Trump campaign through the candidate's campaign
manager and son, thereby also implicating Donald J. Trump
himself,"
wrote former CIA intelligence officer Rolf Mowatt-Larssen and
former Department of Defense special counsel Ryan Goodman.

"This raises the most important questions," they said. "What did
she offer in that meeting? How did Donald Trump Jr., Jared
Kushner, and Paul Manafort respond?"

Most important, said Bob Deitz, a former top lawyer at the
National Security Agency and the CIA, is determining what exactly
was discussed at the meeting.

"It probably wasn't as fruitless as Trump Jr. is saying," he
said. "It's like peeling an onion. This is just layer after layer
that keeps coming out."

Indeed, the email exchange between Trump Jr. and Rob Goldstone,
the British music publicist who arranged the meeting between
Veselnitskaya and the Trump campaign,
appears to align with a series of pivotal moments during the
2016 campaign.

Trump Jr. has so far maintained that Veselnitskaya offered him
"no meaningful information" on Clinton during the meeting and
quickly pivoted to discussing a Russian adoption program that was
cut off in retaliation for the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which
blacklisted Russians suspected of human-rights abuses.

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The Kremlin-linked lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya speaking with a journalist in Moscow on November 8.

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Yury Martyanov /Kommersant Photo via AP

Veselnitskaya has also said that "nothing at all about the
presidential campaign" was discussed. She said she had "never
acted on behalf of the Russian government" and "never discussed
any of these matters with any representative of the Russian
government."

Either way, the revelations most likely won't be the last to
emerge about the meeting.

"Some of the remarks in the email exchanges hint at collusion in
the hacking of DNC and Podesta email servers," said Mark Kramer,
the program director for the Project on Cold War Studies at
Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Affairs.

'They became compromised to Russia'

Eoyang, the former House Intelligence Committee staffer, said she
didn't think "that in the case of the Trump campaign (and
officials), the dangles worked the way the Russians would hope in
recruiting an asset."

Bill Browder, the hedge fund manager who spearheaded the passage
of the Magnitsky Act in the US after the death of his lawyer,
Sergei Magnitsky, was also skeptical.

"The Russians are blunt and extreme," he said. "This is not how
they operate."

Mark Galeotti, a Russia expert who is a senior research fellow at
the Institute of International Relations Prague, said that while
"it is possible the Kremlin could have been testing the waters,
this seems a fairly clumsy way of doing it."

Still, Galeotti
wrote on Wednesday: "In Vladimir Putin's Russia, everyone is
potentially 'hybrid.' Both who they seem to be, and, at the same
time, an instrument of the government ... The idea of
Veselnitskaya as a deniable intermediary is not entirely
implausible."

Collusion does not have to be "coerced, paid, or unwilling to be
espionage," Eoyang said. "In fact, it's less useful if they are.
You want your asset to be motivated to see the world your way.
The question will be what level of coordination existed and
whether this can be remedied."

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Donald Trump Jr. being interviewed by Fox News host Sean Hannity in New York City on Tuesday.

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Richard Drew/AP

Even if Russia didn't float the Veselnitskaya meeting in an
attempt to entice the Trump campaign into colluding, it may have
reaped other rewards. The Trump campaign "provided a gift to the
Russians by covertly signaling to them that this team was ready
and willing to be compromised," said Ned Price, a former CIA
analyst who served as the senior director of the National
Security Council under President Barack Obama.

If Veselnitskaya was acting as an agent of the Russian
government, then Russia has known for months that the Trump
campaign was willing to accept the services of a hostile foreign
power working to influence an election.

"The moment the Trump team tried to obscure that fact, as they
did repeatedly during the campaign, they became compromised to
Russia," Price said. "That's the intelligence jackpot."